I feel a bit torn on Moneyball. It's well-acted, essentially well-directed, and the script holds together well; the problem is, it feels a bit diffuse. You get the feeling that there are three different movies competing for screentime, which I think comes from the problem of adapting a book like Moneyball, which isn't really a narrative. Sorkin's proven his ability to adapt well from odd sources, but this doesn't flow nearly so well as The Social Network did. The three main movies are: a somewhat detached look at a two men removing the “sport” element from team management and the conflict that brings, the super-stereotypical sports movie where the underdogs no one expects anything from come from behind to win it all against insurmountable blah blah blah, and a human interest movie about a man combining the protective impulses of a father with his job and background to find a way to protect others from the mistakes he's made. Essentially, there's the Sorkin movie, the Miller (the director) movie, and the producers' movie (which is Blind Side II: Now With Baseball).
The Sorkin movie is really good – potentially great, even. The dehumanizing of sports, one of our culture's last rites, in an effort to raise competitiveness, an endeavor which is fruitless almost as soon as it's started working, is the stuff of a Great Movie. It's a friendlier Godfather, an ambiguous allegory on capitalism and its effects, but shot through with snappy patter and Jonah Hill being large and awkward.
But, this movie isn't all there. I don't care to know the details behind its failure, whether the script just never got polished enough or whether it got torn to shreds in an effort to make the movie more palatable to the desired audience. Sorkin's had enough mega-failures of his own making (see: Studio 60) that I wouldn't put it past him to fumble this one.
The remaining movies do make me doubt that, though. The director seems uninterested in the numbers-crunching that is the heart (or, rather, lack thereof) of the story. Instead you see a lot of the games, recreated and file footage both. Particularly egregious is the nearly-concluding montage of victory's for the A's, complete with slow-mo home runs and base running, fans rising up as a tidal wave of applause, bombastic music trying desperately to convey the grandeur of the moment. Maybe this is all intended satirically, so that the lack of a world series, and the lack of notability afterward, is all the more jarring. Maybe – but it sure doesn't feel like that. The viewer gets the idea that if it weren't for all those messy facts they could've given the movie a good ending, which is rather beside the point.
And now let's deal with the – ugh – producers' movie. For those of you who don't know, Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, is also the author of The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game in which there's sort of a human interest story but mostly it's about how much football has changed due to an iconoclastic individual doing things in a new way. The movie version enlarged the human interest story and turned it into The Blind Side, which made 1000% of its budget at the box office, a fact I'm sure has nothing to do with why the producers desperately wanted Moneyball to be like it. Anyway, in The Blind Side II: This Time It's Brad Pitt, we see a devoted divorcee dad learning to love people, projected through his saintly love and kindness towards his daughter. It is a plot (and a treatment of a plot) so banal I have nothing to say about it. The most you could say about it is that it skews any interpretation of the film towards the humanistic, showing that happiness comes through love and not success, a moral that feels about as tacked on as the last chapter of The Book of Job.
Moneyball ends up being accidentally reflective of the story it tells. It tries to do things a bit differently, with a focus on the numbers, and this works for most the film, but in the end it fizzles out. Now all that's left is for someone to come along and make a totally brilliant film about the Red Sox world series and make us forget all about Moneyball and the A's.
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